Oocytes & Ovaries.
Growing up, I remember feeling like the house was never quite tidy enough and I was never quite quiet enough. Now I’m the one picking up half-eaten snacks, and turning down - well - everything electronic. I remember my mom teary eyed behind her driving glasses whispering, “sit there quietly, like a mouse.” Now I understand feeling so overwhelmed by the avalanche of questions, the barrage of demands, the innocent neediness of childhood, and the ever present low-grade migraine, that you plead for a few moments of peace. My mother was right to feel utterly drained.
The pressures I face hardly hold a candle to my parents’ 1990s reality. When we immigrated in 1987, we were told it would take approximately five years to acclimate. Five years of fighting to keep your head above water. Remember the constant vigilance of 2020? The desperate attempts to stay safe while in chaos? If you’ve never been penniless and alone in a foreign country, the early months of Coronavirus might be the best comparison. Now imagine navigating that powerlessness with a two-year-old (aka little-me). Then, as soon as they got a glimpse of shore, my parents divorced. Another tidal wave, though this one was self-inflicted. Divorce involves unlearning and grieving every routine you knew. It is a shattering of your entire way of being, so you can repurpose the core elements into something more authentic. My mom was 19 when they married, and 36 when they divorced. She had to relearn being an adult, a woman, an American, and a mother all at once.
Though that isn’t my story, it is certainly part of my story. Did you know that a newborn baby girl already has the oocytes (or immature eggs) that will someday join with sperm to become her offspring? Apparently most (if not all) of our eggs are present at birth! We also know that the gestational environment - the woman’s body - has enormous consequences for lifelong development. We all know that drinking too much alcohol while pregnant can cause Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Well, too much stress can be devastating too. So, if a part of me, that special oocyte, had always been part of my mom, then her story is my story too. In fact, from the moment the oocytes developed in my tiny little ovaries, in my mom’s growing pregnant belly, her story was part of my children’s stories.
All those stressors of my early years - the prejudice, migration, assimilation, and reacclimation - they forever changed my physiology, and maybe that of my daughters. All those days I couldn’t eat because the anxiety was eating me; I see their impact in my daughter’s questions. Last week we were driving behind a fire engine and my four year old asked whether it was an ambulance. I answered no, and explained that it was coming from the fire station down the road. She replied, “oh good, I was worried something happened to Daddy.” I nearly swerved. She had no reason to think her dad was unwell, yet that’s where her mind went. Mine flashed back to the similar worries of my own childhood. When you’re only with one parent at a time, one is always unaccounted for. My eyes routinely followed ambulances to make sure they weren’t going toward the other parent’s house.
Parenting forces us to relive our own childhoods. Now I understand my mother’s frenetic cleaning as an attempt to create order where there was so much disorder. And she was absolutely right - a calm environment does calm the mind. When I catch myself in a similar frenzy I try to surface what’s really bothering me before I snap at my daughter for a rogue pen-cap. Maybe then I can approach her with the patience she deserves, and slowly heal the oocytes in her ovaries.
